How the Obamacare insurance marketplace can help rural residents

The Affordable Care Act’s online insurance marketplace has its problems, but the service also has potential to help improve rural health. Jon M. Bailey, the director of rural research and analysis at the Center for Rural Affairs, went as far as putting it this way:

“The new health insurance marketplaces were practically created for rural people.”

Here’s why: The marketplace is targeted to help the uninsured and underinsured population, and those who don’t have access to employer-sponsored insurance plans. As Bailey pointed out to me, that target group exist in larger concentrations rural areas.

“It’s going to be difficult,” Bailey said. “It’s difficult to reach rural people spread over large areas, but I think we’ve seen groups doing it one town at a time, and I think that’s how we have to do it in rural areas.”